Digital graphic design, image editing, audio editing, and video editing applications (hereafter collectively referred to as media content editing applications or media editing applications) provide graphical designers, media artists, and other users with the necessary tools to create a variety of media content. Examples of such applications include Final Cut Pro® and iMovie®, both sold by Apple Inc. These applications give users the ability to edit, combine, transition, overlay, and piece together different media content in a variety of manners to create a resulting media project. The resulting media project specifies a particular sequenced composition of any number of text, audio clips, images, or video content that is used to create a media presentation.
Various media editing applications facilitate such composition through electronic means. Specifically, a computer or other electronic device with a processor and computer readable storage medium executes the media content editing application. In so doing, the computer generates a graphical interface that allows designers to digitally manipulate graphical representations of the media content to produce a desired result.
One difficulty in media editing is that a user cannot easily perform facial image processing of the people in video content. For instance, video content that is shot in sub-optimal lighting conditions (e.g., poor or incorrectly lit) can make a face or faces difficult to see. Moreover, in these sub-optimal lighting conditions, the faces can have a color cast that causes the faces to be displayed with an incorrect skin tone or color (e.g., red, blue, green, etc.). Therefore, facial image processing might be necessary to address these issues.
In some instances, focusing on the face of a person is desired in a particular video content. For example, facial editing can be performed to focus the visual attention of the viewer to the face only. In other instances, facial editing is performed to isolate one's face from other people in the video content. Therefore, specific facial image processing can be performed to provide more visual emphasis on the face in video content.
In a typical media editing application, the user is required to manually locate faces in a given video frame, manually select areas of the faces for image processing, and then apply the image processing to these selected areas of the video frame. Consequently, to perform image correction on the faces in an entire media clip, the user must repeatedly perform these steps for each video frame that includes faces. This is a cumbersome task that is time-consuming and error-prone because the positions of faces can vary frame to frame. Similarly, lighting conditions can change from one video frame to a subsequent video frame.